British Post Office Scandal

Re:British Post Office Scandal by makomk on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @05:37AM (#38938685)

One of the big problems with British politics at the moment is that lots of people seem to think that if the BBC is less willing to pretend there are easy solutions with no downsides the government is ignoring than other parts of the media this is seen as them being in the government's pocket. Which isn't the same as not willing at all, they pretty systematically focus only on the downsides of government policies already - one of the examples that made HN was the UK Covid app, where the BBC treated using Google and Apple's framework as obviously better right up until the point the government launched a new app that did, when they immediately switched and focused only on the advantages of the old app due to it not doing so. They just don't do this as consistently as some other outlets.

That is, the minimum standard they need to meet in order not to be perceived as carrying water for the government is not just lying and misleading the public in order to get the ruling party kicked out, but doing so as aggressively and shamelessly as the most aggressive and shameless of their competitors (which includes social media to some extent).

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Re:British Post Office Scandal by pjc50 on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @09:28AM (#38939324)

> s less willing to pretend there are easy solutions with no downsides the government is ignoring than other parts of the media this is seen as them being in the government's pocket

I really cannot parse all the double negatives in this. Is this an allegation relating to the BBC's ties with the ruling party? https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/jan/24/panel-approvin...

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Re:British Post Office Scandal by makomk on Wednesday January 10, 2024 @06:01PM (#38944736)

If there's any policy which people are calling for but which the government doesn't currently support - for example, passing a law that blanket overturns all of these convictions - it tends to get portrayed as an obvious win with no downsides by much of the British press. If there's something which is currently government policy or effectively so, like leaving this to the courts, we hear about only the downsides of that policy. The BBC does this too, but not quite to the same extent, and they get a lot of flack for it as in this case.

Actually, the government has just announced that they are going to pass such a law, and this helps further demonstrate what I mean. After they announced this, the Guardian ran an analysis piece pointing out all the same reasons why this is potentially a bad idea that the BBC talked about before: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/no-precedent... Their top headline article is also about this announcement and leads by pointing out the same problems: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/10/rishi-sunak-... The way in which the BBC is more pro-Tory than publications like the Guardian is that they're less likely to ignore these problems when talking about activists calling for this prior to it becoming government policy. That is, in order for a British media publication to be adequately anti-Tory in the eyes of the press, whether they treat a proposal as bad or good has to depend on whether it's coming from the Tories.

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